Wasn’t able to get any drawing done today. In light of yesterday’s post about momentum, I’m making a placeholder post for now, will hopefully be able to do some kind of double post on Monday!
Edit: Here we go, another Piranha plant sketch. I was at a Smash tournament/Splatoon meetup yesterday so Planty seems like a reasonable subject.
The most important element of most Blaugusts that I’ve “succeeded” at has been momentum. Last week our household was struck with illness. Woefully curled up in bed with an awful cold, I took last Monday off from blog posting, and that snowballed quickly – even though I worked from home on Tuesday and was back in the office on Wednesday, I was still moping around not feeling like putting a blog post up.
This topic ties into a meta-Blaugust post that I’ve been wanting to write, but I think I’ll keep that in the back pocket for just a bit longer because what I want to do today is get back into the swing of drawing on the daily.
I signed up to a a free online course run by the University of Newcastle, which started this week. The course is “Natural History Illustration 101” and is focused on the discipline of drawing subjects from nature. It’ll run for the next 6 weeks so I hope the course content dribbling in will give me some continued ideas to draw from. This week we’ve been given a bunch of introductory videos to understand what natural history illustration actually is, which has been a lovely source of cool inspiration (butterflies, birds and plants, oh my!)
In addition, registrants to the course have been offered a login to the Global Plants website, which is apparently a really huge repository for plants.
Today’s sketch is thus a Money Plant. The reference picture is actually from wikipedia, as I didn’t like any of the reference material on the global plants website. I had a recent conversation with John in which I mentioned this plant but he wasn’t familiar with it.
Rendering this was really difficult. For a start, I haven’t done any representational artwork in ages, so those skills are all rusty. But secondly, the tones and patterns on the actual seed pods of the plant made it really hard to convey them in a way that made sense. One seed pod in the photo was really shiny. Others were mottled. They’re actually really flat discs, and I don’t think that’s apparent from my sketch at all.
Anyway, it was good to draw just for the sake of it. Here’s to getting back a bit of momentum.
Well, when in doubt for what to draw, turn to Pokémon. But which Pokémon?
Well, I remembered when the Pokéfusion site was going around again a while ago and everyone was posting the fusion that they would get from first random loading.
Well, I back then, I loaded up the site to find my assigned Pokéfusion and get….
So when I was stuck for what to draw today, Shellder seemed as good a choice as any. This little guy is actually a bit tricky to draw in ways I hadn’t expected, but lookit it, so cute!
By chance, some dear friends (UnwiseOwl from the Leaflocker and Havra) dropped into my Tetris stream the other night so we decided to play and stream some impromptu games of Mah Jong.
After that, Havra tempted us into another game tonight, so of course we had to oblige! This left me without a lot of time to eke out some art for tonight, so I took inspiration from the game and drew what I could between hands.
Tonight I worked on some custom CSS that could be injected into a BrowserSource in OBS to turn a bracket that looks something like this:
Into something that looks like this:
The CSS is included below for future reference.
@import url("https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Press+Start+2P&display=swap");
body {
background: black;
}
svg text {
font-family: "Press Start 2P", monospace;
}
/*** Remove rounded edges ***/
svg g.match rect.match--base-background {
rx: 0;
ry: 0;
}
svg g.match g {
clip-path: none;
}
/**** Seeds ****/
svg path.match--seed-background {
fill: #c1261d;
outline: 2px solid black;
outline-offset: 0px;
}
svg text.match--seed {
transform: translateY(4px);
fill: black;
}
/**** Player Names ****/
svg text.match--player-name {
font-size: 15px;
transform: translateY(5px);
fill: white;
stroke: transparent;
}
svg text.match--player-name.-placeholder {
stroke: transparent;
/* fill: transparent; */
font-size: 10px;
transform: translateY(2px);
}
svg path.match--player-background {
outline: 2px solid black;
outline-offset: 0px;
}
/**** Match dividing line ****/
svg line.match--player-divider {
stroke: black;
stroke-width: 3px;
}
/**** Player Scores ****/
svg text.match--player-score {
font-size: 15px;
transform: translateX(1px) translateY(5px);
fill: black;
stroke: transparent;
}
svg g.match svg.match--player path.match--player-score-background {
outline: 2px solid black;
outline-offset: 0px;
/* outline: 2px double #c1261d;
outline-offset: -7px; */
fill: white;
}
svg g.match svg.match--player path.match--player-score-background.-winner {
/* Winner gets highlighted background */
fill: #f39c05;
}
/*** Round Names ***/
svg .round-label text {
transform: translateY(2px);
}
svg.round g.round-label rect {
fill: black;
outline: 2px solid #aaecf2;
outline-offset: -4px;
}
span.live-stamp {
display: none;
}
A little while before Blaugust started, I found myself with the itch to pick up art projects. I guess I saw Blaugust on the horizon and wanted to bulk up on content.
On Twitter, I saw a bunch of animation students needing people to work on content for their animations. That was seriously tempting, then I remembered the pressure of being responsible for people’s uni assignments (something I had some experience with when doing laser cutting jobs a few years ago) and I cooled on it a bit.
After that, I saw someone in the PAX Australia Enforcer group asking for someone to draw up some maps and logos for their DnD game. That sounded pretty nifty, and would flex some skills that are somewhat weak for me.
They sent over a hand-drawn map which included descriptions of a building with a number of floors. I initially decided I’d try modelling it in 3D. Here’s a close-up of the staircase, which was a fun little puzzle to try to solve.
The 3D floorplan really wasn’t working and it tripped me up a bit. So I decided to go back to basics – draft out the floorplan in Illustrator and then draw in details in Photoshop. I improvised somewhat with the rooms as the initial sketches just described a run down interior. You’ll recognise the floorboards from an earlier post!
Eventually, working in Photoshop and making adjustments to the actual layout of the building got quite cumbersome, especially when the interior walls needed to be changed to be wooden panels rather than stone. Maintaining both the untextured Illustrator version and the textured Photoshop one became a pain, because my Photoshop layers would no longer match up to my vector outlines.
I moved as much as I could back into Illustrator. For the walls, I used a number of appearance modifiers to create the lines. A single path therefore displayed its texture and a dark outline without me needing to draw in any fills. This made readjusting stuff much easier!
Here’s the completed floor. We left these rooms bare as the players will be furnishing them.
Since this is now a vector artwork I lost the crinkled paper effects that I could achieve by using a displacement map + multiply layer in Photoshop, but there’s nothing stopping me from just doing that as an extra step at the end of the process.
I learned a lot while drafting this floor. However I’ve been quite slow in turnaround time. The requester has been very patient with me!
I’ve since asked for their permission to post the work on the blog so if we do future floors I will be able to utilise them as my daily blog posts. That way I won’t be trying to do a daily sketch AND make revisions in the same evening.
I put John on the spot and asked him what I should draw tonight, and his answer was, “a mountain”.
So here’s a sketch of Mt Fuji.
Made dumplings tonight so I tried drawing a dumpling. Not a very successful attempt but it’s something to post at least!
Lately we’ve been streaming our board game misadventures.
With the webcam set up over our table, we can capture a reasonable amount of the play area, but things are quite hard to read. So I’ve been experimenting with some overlays to convey pertinent game information.
Here’s a demo of the overlay in action – the popup in the top left only appears for a little while when I change the “last tile visited” variable, and the player information allows us to track all of the different resources and upgrades that the players pick up along the way.
I think keeping the overlays updated is quite the distraction though – I guess that’s my excuse for John going 3-0 undefeated tonight!
I have been a bit lazy today and also have had some evening commitments. So in a familiar Blaugust daze I had no idea what to do for today’s post. Pretty dire situation for a weekend!
There’s a few other things I wanted to do tonight so I decided to set a 10 minute timer. I wanted to keep Blaugust momentum up but I didn’t want to feel chained to dedicating a long time to a post, so the 10 minute timer really distils down the essence of my approach to Blaugust – do stuff, post it, don’t worry so much about quality.
As we were unloading from the car this evening I remembered these daffodils that are growing in my front driveway. My nieces planted them on a previous visit and they’re flowering in their full glory. I had taken some photos to send to my nieces so I had a handy reference to hand.
Here’s what was on my canvas at the end of my 10 minutes.
